6 Fictional Places You Won't Believe Actually Exist (Part 2)

We've written once before about make-believe fantasylands we thought existed solely in the minds of comic book writers and dead English professors, but that actually turned out to be real. Well, it looks like most of those "wondrously imaginative" settings were all just real places that the creators thought were neat, and subsequently, that most "wondrously imaginative" storytellers were just boring old tourists this whole time. Here are six more places you thought were fictional, when in fact you could totally roll up to them on a moped and take some obnoxious pictures in front of ...

#6. The Ewok Village from Return of the Jedi

Located in the Happy Grove section of the Forest Moon of Endor, Chief Chirpa's Bright Tree Village is the enormous toy commercial from the original Star Wars trilogy that gave us our first dark hint of Lucas' future works.

The general suckage of Ewoks aside, if we were to tell you that the Ewok tree village exists, right now, in Costa Rica, your only questions would be "What's the soonest flight to Costa Rica?" and "Oh God, where is my credit card? Where is it?! I swear to Christ I will burn this house down if only to better sift through the ashes!"

Finca Bellavista is an actual sky-high tree community of about two dozen luxurious tree houses joined by walkways and zip lines. It is, if anything, way cooler than its fictional counterpart, if only because you don't have to tolerate those precocious teddy bear bastards all up in your grill. As far as Ewok villages go, this is more Holiday Inn than "warlike tribal society," but still, we can't imagine you'd be the first to run down those catwalks in your birthday suit, hurling spears at the other terrified tourists ...

Via Fincabellavista.net"OK, C-3PO, now that they believe you're their god, demand a blood sacrifice in our honor."

The people who run Finca Bellavista would not only be understanding of your pop-culture-addled, inappropriate and possibly dangerous behavior -- they'd encourage it. This isn't one of those stuffy "don't run by the pool" hotels. They actually let you travel from tree house to tree house by zip-lining about like some sort of fat, drunken, shaved Ewok.

"If you fall, aim for the large pile of past tourists."

#5. The Hallelujah Mountains from Avatar

The Fictional Setting:

Those huge, floating mountains in Avatar made up the single most striking visual of the film (except for maybe that awkward tail-bang between the two giant blue leopard people).

The Real Thing:

Via Absolut-china.comThese trees. NO, wait. We see the mountains now. It's the mountains.

As it turns out, Avatar, the single highest-grossing film of all time, could just as easily have been shot using a camcorder and retitled Stuff James Cameron Saw While on Vacation to China. If you want to visit Pandora and climb the Hallelujah Mountains yourself, just grab your passport and fly over to China's Anhui Province. Even Cameron admits the inspiration: "All we had to do was simply recreate Huangshan Mountain in outer space."

Via Wikimedia Commons"The blue people were a computer-generated representation of what I think the Chinese look like."

And if you get bored of the Mountains That Should Not Be, you can moped on over to China's Hunan Province and take a gander at Wulingyuan, which is actually more Pandora than Pandora, in parts:

Via Topchinatravel.comHoly crap, you can just hear the cross-species sex scene echoing through the canyons.

We can only assume there are giant native birds on top of things for you to joyride about, thus showing the primitive natives that white people are way better at being their race than they are.

While Cameron claims to have gotten his idea from Huangshan Mountain, the Zhangjiajie government is so convinced that their mountains were the actual inspiration for Avatar that they officially changed the name of their majestic "South Sky Pillar" to "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain."

Via Daily MailIt's about one mile north of the Ferris Bueller's Day Off river.

Right, because clearly an awe-inspiring name like "South Sky Pillar" just won't stand the test of time. It makes much more sense to retitle one of the most stunning landscapes on Earth some awkward string of Engrish that references an already stale 3-D action movie.

#4. Sea Labs

The Fictional Setting:

We've seen sea labs in countless movies and television shows over the years -- research facilities impossibly constructed that stretch to or sometimes dwell completely at the bottom of the ocean, because apparently everything has more science in it when you're underwater.

There's almost too many to list: That ridiculous shark corral from Deep Blue Sea, the facility from The Abyss, DeepStar Six, uh ... SeaQuest? That works, right? (Honestly, we were way too taken with Jonathan Brandis' dreamy smile to notice what type of lab was housing it at the time.)

The Real Thing:

Water aliens, explosions, mutant sharks and Brandis aside, the idea of an undersea research station is actually pretty feasible. Behold, the Aquarius Reef Base:

"This is just where we keep the beer. The real lab is over by the underwater football stadium."

That's right: There is a genuine, fully-functional sea lab beneath the ocean right now, just waiting for someone to go too far in the name of science and be hoisted by the petard of their own hubris.

The Aquarius Reef Base is owned by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and is located in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. It is maintained by the University of North Carolina Wilmington, whose students no doubt take this responsibility very seriously and in no way use the reflecting pool as a giant gravity bong.

Now regularly used by NASA to train astronauts, the Aquarius remains a glorious testament to human ingenuity and a permanent reminder that the best research is always done while totally isolated in an ominous-looking facility immersed in a crushingly lethal environment.